Driving Sustainable Ship Recycling - A Case Study of the Container Shipping Industry

The main target of this thesis is to develop knowledge about the different drivers that can facilitate the widespread adoption of sustainable ship recycling by ship owners. This thesis also aims to look at the advantages a ship owner can gain by effective communication of its ship recycling policy, the impact of such a ship recycling policy on a ship owner and also the opportunity to feed back information from the end-of-life phase of a ship to the Project Management of a new ship. The Systems Engineering process with a lifecycle perspective is applied to study the problem. The problem is also analysed from the perspective of Corporate Social Responsibility for ship owners. A case study based on a ship owner from the container shipping industry is carried out to determine the current state of the art of ship recycling and also to investigate further the measures that can drive sustainable ship recycling by ship owners. It was determined that even though in the current scenario the issue of ship recycling is at a nascent stage of development with not much attention paid to this issue by the different stakeholders, this issue is bound to gain importance in the coming years due to international regulations, the potential for ship owners to gain competitive advantage based on their activities in ship recycling and also because of the tremendous amount of raw materials like steel that can be derived from end-of-life ships